The Elvis Spectacle and the Cultural Industries
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The Elvis Spectacle and the Cultural Industries By Douglas Kellner Several decades after his death and almost fifty years after his period of what many believe to be his greatest creativity and significance, Elvis Presley is considered by many the King of Rock and Roll. Elvis is indeed a cultural icon of the highest order, a global popular who continues to attract adulation and fanatic devotion throughout the world. In the early 1990s, I went to a market in Guadalajara, Mexico and there was a stand selling garish knitted velvet portraits of Jesus Christ, Che Guevara, and -- Elvis Presley. Graceland continues to be a popular tourist site, a Mecca for Elvis devotees attracting over one-half million tourists each year, a mausoleum to celebrate and enshrine Elvis' pop divinity. Elvis fans continue to have yearly conventions and an International Elvis convention met for some years in Mississippi, bringing together academics and fans from all over the world to discuss the Elvis phenomenon. Rarely does a month go by in which there is not an article on Elvis, his former wife Priscilla, and daughter Lisa Marie in one of the tabloids that continue to circulate old stories and create new ones. Elvis products still proliferate and there are entire catalogues entirely dedicated to commodities ranging from Elvis telephones to giant Elvis dolls. The Elvis industry carries on turning out book after book on Elvis with the list now in the hundreds of titles (over 500 at last count). Elvis Web-sites proliferate and are among the Internet's most popular attractions, while his movies frequently rerun on TV. Sirius satellite radio has a popular all-Elvis radio channel, and in May 2005 CBS centered a week’s programming on a TV-bio Elvis and a two-hour special, featuring Priscilla and Lisa Marie. And so the King continues to reign in a bizarre afterlife of popularity, commerce, and musical immortality. The question therefore arises: why of all the superstar musical performers of the post-World War II era is Elvis the Icon who just won't fade away? What made Elvis so distinctive and successful and why do fans today continue to idolize him? In the following study, I apply the methods of cultural studies to respond to the question of why Elvis Presley has played such a significant role in U.S. and even global culture, why he is a cultural icon of unparalleled importance, and why Elvis continues to have such a long shelf-life and afterlife. My argument will be that Elvis was the most important single entertainer, or at least pop musical figure, of the second half of the twentieth century, that he was the major global popular icon of the era, and that it is a challenge to cultural studies to explain his popularity and continuing afterlife. I maintain that Elvis' claim to lasting fame resulted from his impressive musical accomplishments of the 1950s which produced a unique and distinctive blend of African- American-influenced rhythm and blues, traditional country and gospel music, classical pop, and the newly exploding supernova of rock and roll music, of which Elvis would soon become the first acclaimed royalty, the first and undisputed King. It was Elvis who most distinctively blended white and black musical traditions, who created the most special and singular music and personae of the decade and that therefore he deserves the serious attention from those of us engaged in the project of seeking a deeper understanding of the intersections of media culture and society. I’ll also show how the sonic synergies of new music technologies and the culture industries significantly contributed to his success and continuing power. Elvis began the rock music spectacle 1 in which a combination of performance, recording and media technology, and an omnipresent culture industry ready to assiduously market the newest product and hottest commodity used sonic synergies to produce popular stars and cultural icons. The Elvis phenomenon has roots in the spread of radio broadcasting, the rise of television, consolidations in the music and film industry, and development of a highly sophisticated marketing and publicity industry that found Elvis the perfect product to commodify and circulate. And yet something in Elvis’s music and personality transcends the economic and commercial dimension, accounting for his intense popularity during his lifetime and continued popularity today. Hence, another answer to the question why Elvis? will be that Elvis embodied in a particularly striking and dynamic way the key dramas of sex, race, and class which were central to the American experience, that Elvis represented the return of the repressed, of all of those bottled up instinctual and rebellious energies that had been suppressed in the conservative and conformist 1950s, and that therefore he anticipated the later sexual revolution and counterculture of the 1960s and was thus a highly dynamic cultural force whose effects surpassed those of his music alone. On the issue of race, Elvis rode the tide of the civil rights movement. By blending black and white music, he helped legitimate black culture during a time when African Americans were breaking into mainstream music and entertainment culture, sports, and more broadly U.S. society as a result of the civil rights movement. Without forcing the issue, Elvis just naturally sang black, blended black and white, and was thus a progressive force in advancing integration. Moreover, as a working class figure from humble origins, he embodied the American dream of climbing up the class ladder, of transcending the limits of class, of realizing the fantasy of wealth and success, and thus showed that the American dream was possible -- at least for megastar entertainers. But more saliently to the music that was Elvis, Elvis lived the experience of his music, enduring the poverty, suffering, ostracism, and oppression that created the blues as an expression of human dignity and endurance in a mean world, one that Elvis experienced first hand. As a poor working class white southerner, Elvis grew up with blacks, absorbed their culture at first hand, attending black gospel services, listening to black musicians play right in his neighborhood, and listening to black music on the radio. As a rebellious teenager who modeled himself on the Hollywood rebel image of the 1950s, with his long hair and side burns -- and black clothes and style -- Elvis was often ostracized in high school and since he was a poor white boy was also out of synch with middle class white culture. He was originally a country boy and often felt out of place in the city which was initially alien to him, but became a source of fascination. The young Elvis also apparently experienced the yearning for romance and love that he articulated in his songs which thus have the ring of authenticity, that Elvis felt and meant what he sang, that it was grounded in powerful and real experience. Thus Elvis's synthesis of country, gospel, R&B, pop, and the emergent force of rock had the feel of the real thing, of authenticity, and it was Elvis' achievement to fuse these experiences and traditions into a unique musical form. Moreover, Elvis' musical synthesis of the 1950s anticipated the emerging multiracial and multicultural society that became evident by the 1960s. Hence, the young Elvis provides a new synthesis of the energies and experiences that would constitute the American drama of the decades to come –- a complicated passion play of culture, race, sexuality, and class that is still going on today. Moreover, there was something in Elvis' music and figure that transcended the specific 2 dynamics of U.S. society at a particular moment, that rendered Elvis a global popular, that made him a significant figure all around the world. And that something has to do with the universal appeal of his best music, which dealt with basic emotions, yearnings, dreams, and desires of human beings all over the world. There is also a spiritual dimension in his most compelling music and his yearnings to communicate basic human emotions and needs, to tap into that mysterious region between desire and need, to fuse his own individual yearnings with universal experiences and aspirations, and, especially, in performance to fuse with his audience. In a somewhat paradoxical vein, Elvis' most resonant spirituality was in his earlier works precisely when he was most secular, creating the paradox, known to Georges Bataille (1985) and certain French thinkers, of a profane spirituality, a sacred secularity, thus deconstructing the opposition between sacred and profane, the spiritual and the material. To put my point more graphically, I would say that the spirit was most alive in Elvis when he was Elvis the Pelvis, when the spirit (literally) moved him, when he shook and gyrated almost unconsciously, when he was the most outrageously sexual and profane and when he was, figuratively speaking, the god Dionysius himself, as I argue later in the paper. Finally, I want to argue that there are four distinct Elvises: 1) The Young Elvis, Elvis as Rebel, Elvis Dionysius, and the infamous Elvis the Pelvis. This is the young Elvis of the 1950s, who became the first global megastar of rock, and whose music continues to live and resonate today. The Dionysian Elvis is to be distinguished from 2) the Hollywood Elvis, the Elvis of the 1960s who I would argue is the Elvis of the counter1960s, of the counter-counterculture, the Elvis cut off from his communal and Dionysian roots who played the paradoxical role of validating precisely the mainstream culture which his performances and personae repudiated in the 1950s and who distanced himself from the 60s counterculture that his own work prefigured and articulated in the previous decade.